Quake3World

So, what's the deal with this? Everything I've read about it has been positive, especially when it comes to 3D audio for gaming. I always play with headphones, and according to all the reviews, the X-fi gives you a very noticeable improvement when it comes to this. It seems like Creative have finally got their act together.

It's pretty expensive though, although it seems that the cheapest version would be quite enough for my needs.

http://www.tomshardware.com/consumer/20 ... index.html

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1 ... X1K0000532

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/mul ... -x-fi.html

When I first found out about this i read that it can aparrently re-encode music cd's to better quality than what they were originally. Hard to beleive but aparrently its true...

Even if that isn't entirely correct, its still a very impressive bit of kit you have to agree.

yeah, read the last link I posted - they talk about that there, it's more or less just marketing crap

I seriously doubt any music will sound better than the original source.

But 3D sound for games played with headphones can be good. I have this MP3 with some insane 3D sound in it. It's really freaky listening to it. Only works with headphones, but it's damn good. If this soundcard can create soundeffects like this, I'll buy it for sure.

http://files.filefront.com/Binauralrar/ ... einfo.html

Here are some other 3D sound samples, but it's not close to as good as the first one I uploaded to FileFront: http://www.cmorrow.com/cma/audiosamples/index.html

netrex wrote:I seriously doubt any music will sound better than the original source.

you're right. it won't.

Will this one FINALLY be able to do on-the-fly AC3 Encoding, or Dolby Digital?

Because it's about fucking time they did.

Yeah, that would be great for people with AC-3 hardware to get games what doesn't have AC-3 sound to play AFAIK, nForce soundcards have done it for a while though.

AWE32 ought to be enough for anybody.

netrex wrote:Yeah, that would be great for people with AC-3 hardware to get games what doesn't have AC-3 sound to play AFAIK, nForce soundcards have done it for a while though.

The nForce 2 is the only chipset which was capable of encoding to 5.1 Digital on the fly.

What most people don't realise is that optical and coaxial connections only carry a stereo signal, unless the signal is first compressed then transmitted.

On DVDs that's no problem... the audio is already compressed as Dolby Digital or such and the digital receiver decodes it. With PC games and regular music, you have to connect the analog wires (3 or more) between the amp and soundcard to stand a chance of getting 5.1 or better.

Sorry for the lecture, you probably already know more than me.

I knew nForce 2 did that, but thought 3 and 4 did that also.

I haven't had a creative soundcard for liek 8 years
- thinks different

Gravis Ultrasound > *

The X-Fi (esp. the "Fatal1ty" edition with 64 MB extra RAM) are supposed to significantly lower CPU utilization. That's the only reason I'd buy one I guess.

HDA X-Mysique for me, Dolby Digital Live encoding with hardly any processor overhead. Even with XiFi, there will be no DDL... so fuck creative... fuck them with a giant dildo.